It's anathema to environmentalists, but shale gas is a new fossil-fuel source
that could power the world for centuries, says Christopher Booker.

A couple of years back, in the course of one of my articles on Britain’s looming energy crisis, I promised that the following week I would write about an astonishing revolution which could solve all of the UK’s and the world’s energy problems for centuries to come. I never followed this up, but what I was referring to was the incredible technical breakthroughs of recent years that allow almost unlimited amounts of cheap gas to be extracted from the world’s vast reserves of shale, our commonest sedimentary rock.

It had long been assumed that natural gas could only be extracted when, like oil, it had accumulated in underground reservoirs. But a far greater quantity of gas from organic residues is trapped in the rock itself, and the technology has now been developed to extract it by pumping in water mixed with salt and other chemicals at very high pressure. The advantages are enormous. Not only is it a remarkably cheap source of energy, but since most of the process takes place underground, its “environmental footprint” is minimal – far less than that of oil wells or open-cast coal mines, let alone those useless windfarms.

So miraculous is the potential of shale gas to change the world that several countries, led by the US and China, are already piling in to exploit it on a huge scale. And an admirable introduction to this energy revolution by Matt Ridley has just been published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, available online under the title The Shale Gas Shock, with a delightful foreword by the world-famous physicist (and “climate sceptic”) Freeman Dyson.

Ridley lucidly explains how and why shale gas is transforming the world’s energy prospects, and reviews the various objections which have been raised to it by environmentalists, to whom it is anathema. They hate it to the point of hysteria because it offers the prospect of a cheap and abundant fossil-fuel that could keep industrial civilisation going for hundreds of years, and is also, according to their prejudices, environmentally friendly, because its CO2 emissions are much less than those of coal or oil.

Unfortunately we here in Britain and the EU are run by people so much under the sway of such dogmas that they may be disposed to resist to the last the thought of our joining in this revolution (although large reserves of potentially suitable shale are buried below much of eastern England). In trying to resist the kind of unscientific eco-lunacy which has those who rule us in its grip, Mr Ridley’s neat summary provides a welcome briefing note.